


Shedding Skin

by HopeCoppice



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Attempted Sexual Assault, Character Study, Gen, Genderfluid Character, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, canon-typical relationship ambiguity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 07:32:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20272261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HopeCoppice/pseuds/HopeCoppice
Summary: Crowley, when it came down to it, was a snake. And sometimes, like any snake, he needed to shed his skin.





	Shedding Skin

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies for the wildly fluctuating pronouns and the extended snake metaphor.
> 
> Trigger warning: it is very briefly implied that someone tried to sexually assault Crowley before The Nap.
> 
> Also, I apologise if anything in this is offensive - I am genderfluid myself, so it comes from a place of sincerity, but I get that the snake comparison might not be ideal. Also, Crowley's gender here is often closely linked to his/her/their physical attributes, but that's mostly because it seems the easiest way for an occult being to get the right pronouns used throughout history. Sorry!

Crowley, when it came down to it, was still a snake.

That was to say that he  _ wasn’t  _ a snake. He was a demon, who had a certain affinity with snakes. He had taken the form of a snake, long ago, back when he’d first visited Earth after being hurled from Heaven, back when nobody had wanted to take a form that even slightly resembled those of their angelic counterparts. And some of those snakelike traits had stuck.

Crowley could do some very strange things with his tongue; he could twist his spine in ways that defied physics, never mind biology; he could taste smells, if he was careless enough to let himself. And sometimes, like any snake, he needed to shed his skin.

It wasn’t a regular occurrence; he couldn’t predict it, or plan for it. Sometimes, he’d go centuries in a convenient, constant form, and then out of nowhere it would begin to itch. Sometimes, he’d hardly have settled into one form before he felt stifled and had to change again. 

For the most part, he tried to stay consistent; Aziraphale did, after all, and it seemed rude to shake things up, somehow. Then, every so often, he realised that while he, Crowley, was trying not to vibrate out of his skin, Aziraphale was genuinely content to go about his life in, quite simply, the most convenient container that he could have poured his essence into. Aziraphale wasn’t going about as a man because it was the right thing to do, or even because it was the  _ human  _ thing to do; he was doing it because it had never occurred to him to do anything else. Sometimes, it was hard to remember that, but when he did, it made things much easier.

Shortly after the first time Crowley had succumbed to the urge to shed his skin, she’d met Aziraphale at a crucifixion in Golgotha. Crowley hadn’t planned to attend; crucifixions were horrible, depressing, drawn-out sorts of things, and people tended to avert their eyes - usually leading to their noticing Crowley’s, and then it was all she could do to keep  _ herself  _ off a cross. But she’d been in town to work a couple of easy temptations, and she’d sensed the angel’s presence, and she’d figured it was better to get all the questions and judgement over with sooner, rather than later. She ignored the little voice in her head that pointed out that Aziraphale, her ancient enemy, not knowing exactly what she looked like was actually a  _ good  _ thing, a tactical advantage. She felt vulnerable, afraid of how Aziraphale might react to her new form. She didn’t want to  _ keep  _ feeling vulnerable. 

So she went to the crucifixion. Strode up to him, bold as she could manage, and dared him to acknowledge the differences in her corporation. Dared him to send her to stand with the other women, to talk down to her or sneer at her. Aziraphale didn’t bat an eyelid; he acknowledged her new name, and went on as if there was nothing else to talk about. Except the man on the cross, of course. And Crowley was distracted - she’d met the man, after all, the Original Tempter riding again - so it wasn’t until much later that she allowed herself to consider the idea that maybe, just maybe, there wasn’t any reason for Aziraphale to make a fuss about her gender after all.

When they met next, Crowley had shed his skin again; the time after that, he was no different. Aziraphale didn’t seem to notice either way, and Crowley wondered if he ever even really  _ looked  _ at him. If he ever saw him as anything other than  _ demon _ . Crowley shed his skin again a century or two later, and she spent most of the fourteenth century performing miserable temptations in miserable villages, and she was miserable - but at least she felt like she was  _ herself _ . In that century, in that moment, Crowley was completely at home in her skin - she had shed the old one the moment it started to rub, for once - but she would look back at it as the worst century of her existence. It wasn’t just the unrelenting rottenness of the time, the endless, horrible heaps of innocent civilians eaten away by plague and poverty; all of that was awful, but worse was the idea that Aziraphale didn’t  _ see  _ her. Didn’t see  _ anything  _ beyond the cruel twist of fate that had left one of them a shining, glorious angel and the other the blackened remains of what had once been.

Early in the fifteenth century, she ran into Aziraphale in passing; unintentional, a misfortune brought on by their separate assignments bringing them to the same small town. There was no time to stop and chat; Crowley thought she might just manage to slip by without the angel even noticing her, but she was unlucky.

“Crowley! What are you doing here?”

“Tempting,” she told him, refusing to slow, “no time to thwart me? Oh no, what a shame.”

“Well- I- you’re lucky this time.” Aziraphale had hesitated, then called after her as she rushed away. “Suits you, by the way!”

“Oh, this old thing…” Then she was out of earshot, round a corner, safely out of sight, and she had to stop to catch her breath and wait for her blush to subside. The man she was supposed to be tempting was already awful; it wouldn't be a disaster if she let him escape her influence. Aziraphale had noticed her. Had commented on her appearance. He'd seemed…  _ friendly _ , in his way. Perhaps she'd been wrong about him seeing her as nothing more than a demon.

It didn't matter. All that mattered was that barely thirty years after that meeting, she'd shed her skin to walk the world as a man again - and, ten years after that, had found herself back in dresses, unable to abide the alternative any more. That hadn't lasted long, and then Crowley had found himself completely indifferent to gender for a spell. That meant going about as a man, of course; by that time, he and Aziraphale were meeting on purpose, and it was much easier to do that if they seemed to occupy similar places in society.

In the early eighteenth century, Crowley got rather too much of a taste of what it could mean to be a woman in a patriarchal society; her assailant had got rather too much of a taste of what it meant to incur the wrath of a demon, and then neither of them had stirred for almost a hundred years. The difference, of course, was that afterwards Crowley had woken up, washed his face, and gone off to catch up with (or rather rescue) Aziraphale, determined to pretend that nothing had happened. The man who'd thought to lay a hand on Crowley, on the other hand, never woke up at all.

By the time the Apocalypse reared its ugly head, Crowley had been wandering around calling himself Anthony for the best part of two centuries (and, although of course he wasn't counting, Aziraphale had complimented his appearance a further three times). He didn't yet feel the  _ need _ to slip into a new skin, but he thought it might be useful if he was going to help raise the Antichrist - he didn't want to be too recognisable afterwards, if it all went to… Somewhere… Besides, after that rather unpleasant experience in 1724, he thought it might be better to slip back into femininity with someone nearby that he could trust. And he  _ could _ trust Aziraphale; centuries of experience had taught him that.

The only problem was that Aziraphale could  _ also  _ be trusted to be more perceptive than he let on. Brother Francis had greeted Nanny Ashtoreth politely when they were introduced, and then the instant they'd both had a spare minute he'd offered to show her around his new domain, leading her to the furthest end of the garden.

"Something you wanted, angel?"

"Only to say that… well, it's still a good look on you. This." Aziraphale gestured vaguely at Crowley's general corporation. "And I'm glad… I thought perhaps…"

"What?"

"...I thought perhaps you wouldn't do it any more. Because, er, I sort of got the impression something happened, before. And I know you're quite capable, but if you ever need anything, I'm right here. Always. That's all."

Crowley had stared at him for longer than could reasonably be considered cool, and then nodded. “Right. Thanks.”

After years of running around after a small child, Crowley was more than ready to shed Nanny Ashtoreth’s skin before running around to try to stop the apocalypse. It felt more like a clean break, then, less like Warlock’s beloved Nanny was abandoning him. Then events spiralled out of control, and almost before he knew it, they were screeching to a halt again at a table at the Ritz.

“To the world,” Aziraphale said, with that brilliant smile of his, and Crowley felt it; that almost imperceptible twinge right down at the core of him. Change was on the way once more.


End file.
